


Ambiguity (Is Not A Luxury You Can Afford Any Longer)

by skellerbvvt



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: First Time, Forced Telepathy, M/M, Mind Melding, Science, Soul Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 01:39:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skellerbvvt/pseuds/skellerbvvt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sorry to barge in like this.” Cecil began, hands knitted together like a nervous scarf trailing down the street in a beautiful traffic accident. “But I had to do a bit of late night reporting about that Thing We Are Not Supposed To Mention, and I was going to simply stay the night in the studio, but then that Thing We Are Not Supposed To Mention made the station stop existing for about twenty minutes. Not to worry, as I was fleeing for my life down the road, I noticed that the radios in people's homes did once again return to programming, thus saving us from the screeching, reedy screams of the open, unfilled airwaves.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ambiguity (Is Not A Luxury You Can Afford Any Longer)

**Author's Note:**

> Made with a great deal of help from Peppermintmonster (Peppermintmonster.tumblr.com) and by help, I mean we've been hand-flapping at each other about "Welcome To Night Vale" and when she said something smart, I stole it. I stole it and ran.

It was in Carlos' on-going notes that—despite the sort of image one may-or-may-not-get of this _particular_ bustling little desert town from the news— the average citizen of Night Vale was actually remarkably normal, as those things went. Or, well, _on average_ a citizen of Night Vale would probably be recently deceased. However anyone who was alive enough to wish for death, then, would be considered—for the most part—normal. Physically speaking.  


Carlos couldn't say anyone was, strictly speaking, _neurotypical_ , but, then, if one wanted to take a philosophical approach about it, one should consider the implications of abnormality in the case of a shared madness. Carlos was not a psychiatrist or neurologist, and so simply recorded that which could be measured and left the screaming due to agony of an inconsequential life spent spiraling through the void to everyone else.  


But the fact remains that a boy with two heads, or a five headed dragon, or a what-have-you is an individual who _stands out_. It is not as if the roads are packed with shlock horror villains dripping straight out of a collective nightmare that causes everyone to wake up screaming at the same time every week, but has never once visited Carlos.

 

(It made small talk...awkward.

 

“Oh hey, how did you enjoy the shared nightmare last night? I spent the rest of the night drinking and hiding under my desk.”

 

“Oh, I dIdn't catch it.” Carlos would reply, holding sweaty cash in his hand and wanting coffee and trying not to look in the gaping holes cored into the barista's skull.

 

“Oh,” She would say. And then it was just best to go make his own coffee again, staring at his peculator in his socks and bathrobe, listening to the radio and hoping coffee wouldn't be banned before he managed to drink any. Again.)  


The people of Night Vale are, for the most part, _people_. Though Carlos has yet to be able to find a database anywhere with actual numbers. Certainly, well, according to Carlos' research it's rather hard to get a decent census, as it is well known that one should never, under any circumstances, become a statistic. Census takers, according to the interview transcripts Carlos has, are not to be trusted.

 

“If they knock at your door to ask who lives there, simply reply with 'No One.' and you may survive another decade.” A man had said as he continued to knit a scarf that Carlos had seen before, lying in the road with no obvious beginning or end, stretching in long loops down the sidewalk as the man just continued to add onto it (“Llama wool, not sheep's wool. That's banned.” The man had held up his skien of yarn. “Thank the city for protecting us from the blight of sheep.”)

 

“Just make sure that the census taker is not actually a realtor. Just remember that realtors live in the stomach of deer, which have four legs and will make clopping noises upon approach. Census takers approach without warning and desire to count you among their numbers.” The man had added. Carlos had dutifully written that down.

 

(“Is that a writing implement?” The man had asked.  


“No, I'm doodling very specific arcane symbols onto this bleached white blight on the human condition. So it's a drawing utensil.” Carlos had replied.

  
“Well, that's okay then,” The man had said, returning to knitting.)

 

Anyone who has lived in Night Vale knows to keep their eyes closed when at all possible. The general idea Carlos has gotten is: What you can't see will probably still hurt you, but seeing it coming rarely saves anyone anyway, so why not live in the peaceful little dream world? If asked a question deny everything. If you know something you should not? Don't.

 

There were lots of similar little tips and tricks one got used to in Night Vale, which, according to the calender, was hardly attacked or under dire threat _every_ week, and even when they were, the death toll was never _catastrophic_ or anything. The City Council would hardly let that many bad things happen to tax payers, because really, who else is going to pay to rebuild all those streets? Marcus Vanston sure isn't. He never has to pay for anything people use ever again. According to Cecil: “He has paid his dues to society. So that leaves every somewhat living human remaining to pick up, pitch in and help.”

 

But the average citizen of Night Vale is, physically at least, fairly stereotypical. Just the one head, and the four limbs, with two of those limbs ending in feet, and one of them ending in a hand, and the other ending in: “a reminder that the city will settle your library overdue fines. It will settle them once and for all.”

 

(“Perhaps,” someone suggested once, “an after-hours book drop?”

 

“We need The hands.” The City Council had said. Not in unison. That would have been weird. Rather more like an echo chamber, building on top of one another's voices in a purposefully off-key non-harmonization that had, eventually, broken up the Town Meeting.)

All of this said with the point being that when Carlos heard a sheepish knock-knock-knock on his door (and after peering through the crack in his window, because he wasn't one to close his eyes to make his life less painless), and saw the vague outline of someone who could have been anyone, it wasn't until there was a hesitant, pained: “Carlos” that he knew who was trying to get in, because a vague outline was a vague outline, and it wasn't as if Night Vale was crawling with a manifest of divine horrors to treat to tea _all_ the time.

 

Carlos opened the door quickly. “Cecil, it is past curfew, what are you—”

 

Cecil was a very, for the most part, law-abiding citizen. One would not, generally, find him out past fingerprint enforced curfew, or using pens, or reading books not on the approved list, or failing to be at Big Rico's once a week, or, at least, having it delivered to the station.

 

(Carlos had done tests on every aspect of the slices and had, thankfully, found no obvious drugs or chemicals that one might not generally find in a pizza slice, but, then, he always felt curiously... _uncurious_ post Big Rico's. He had discovered, however, that for the most part law enforcement was... spotty and distractable. Vicious and with a hair trigger, certainly, but they did not have very good record keeping, and one could, in fact simply _go_ to Big Rico's without eating anything and no one would do anything about it. Especially if one started to monologue about fluid dynamics, or Newtonian physics in one's spare time, or write long nonsense equations in the condensation of a shower door. Given long enough, the suspicious bushes outside his house would move off and point in another direction. By now Carlos was hardly ever monitored, which came in handy for when he needed to break the law to save the entire town from whatever horrible construct they weren't allowed to speak of or contemplate

 

Also when caught with a notebook and a pen, the Sheriff's Secret Police Officer had jittered from foot to foot and when Carlos explained how it wasn't a writing implement, actually, but an device crafted from a cylindrical plastic shaft containing a smaller open-ended shaft, with a pointed end that held a small metal ball with which one rolled fast-drying pigment onto flattened mat of tree fibers and sulfur.

 

The officer had blushed, pushed his hands through his hair and said: “Well, I supposed _that's_ okay for a _scientist_ to have.”

 

Carlos had discovered a lot of people blushed, now, when talking to him. He tried to do studies, but people tended to stammer, make an excuse, and then walk _at_ the sky and contemplate the void their tiny ball of dust hurtled through, spinning and the solar system was spinning, and oh look, now Carlos was staring up at the ceiling and contemplating the pointlessness of any of it. Now was not the time for idle hobbies.)

  
Cecil sort of...burst...into Carlos' house and then helped him close and re-lock the doors, then stood there while Carlos laid a line of salt down. (Well. Not just salt. Chili, onion and garlic powder, cayenne and black pepper, oregano, paprika, and cumin. It wasn't so much the forces of evil fearing salt and the forces of the unheard, unseen and unspoken thinking that crowding the meat ruined the flavor, and so would not devour one's flesh, bone and essence if they thought you might be pre-seasoned. Carlos used his grandmother's taco seasoning recipe because it was the only recipe of hers he could make. Carlos was not a chemist or a baker.)

 

“Sorry to barge in like this.” Cecil began, hands knitted together like a nervous scarf trailing down the street in a beautiful traffic accident. “But I had to do a bit of late night reporting about that Thing We Are Not Supposed To Mention, and I was going to simply stay the night in the studio, but then that Thing We Are Not Supposed To Mention made the station stop existing for about twenty minutes. Not to worry, as I was fleeing for my life down the road, I noticed that the radios in people's homes did once again return to programming, thus saving us from the screeching, reedy screams of the open, unfilled airwaves.”

 

Carlos nods at this, because it is not like Cecil to drop by uninvited, especially during a full moon, and especially, especially not during a full moon at _night_.

  
“I see,” he says. “It occurs to me I have not yet had the chance to investigate what it is that happens to the people who are found dead of terror after being left out at night. Is this an early stage?”

 

Cecil looks to the seething void shadows dripping from his body as if he's an artists rendition of himself, and here are ink smudges bleeding from his outline, trailing down to his normal shadow. Or, maybe, it's Cecil's normal shadow bleeding up onto him, clinging with the grasping, attention-starved fingers of a toddler, or the last dying wish of a leper.

 

“Ah yes. Well,” He clears his throat. “That would just be the early stages of a slight infection which should clear up with plenty of rest, liquids, a long bloodstone circle chant and a great deal of luck.”

 

“Infection?” Carlos asks, and he's already getting his machines out. They have names. He used to know their names. But a side effect of living in this particular town for a year is that one become careful not to think of things in proper nouns, but rather as their descriptions.

 

Giving and getting directions often proves...frustrating. So many streets lead to “Nowhere of importance when life is just a ritual of moving for the sake of doing so as your flesh rots gently around you, composting quietly as your meat-made-brain electrocutes itself to even do the simplest of tasks.”

 

“Is that near the car lot?” Carlos had asked.

 

“No.” The Erika had replied.

 

“Yes. When the moon is high and the lights blurring over our bustling little haven in the desert have turned into blurs, anyone who has the ability to block light with their body can become infected with unspeakable terrors of a compulsion beyond human comprehension. See a Doctor if you experience any of the following: Nightmares during the day beyond the normal spectrum of paranoid delusions brought on by living in a world where you cannot trust the motivations of anyone, especially those you think closest to you. The manifestation of a physical outward horror-scape. The foreboding sense of immediate, unlawful death. And dry eye.”

 

Sometimes Cecil forgot he was not on the radio. That was fine. Carlos often forgot he was not in his lab, and thus tried to start cycles when he was nowhere near the machine he required to do such a thing. It is an understandable impulse. Cecil's radio show frequently stretches from morning until night. Carlos rarely listens to it all, fully, catching one news segment, then wandering off. And it always feels like he's hearing all of three or four stories, and missing others entirely. He always gets The Weather and Traffic, but other segments move, come up and are lost. Sometimes, despite knowing Cecil has a radio program every day, he only remembers two of them at the end of the month. Sometimes, despite knowing Cecil's radio program occasionally stretches for twelve hours, he feels like he can only remember about twenty minutes of it.

 

But. Well: Time.

 

Carlos moves closer. Cecil, specifically, has always been firmly human. No extra limbs or heads, no more eyes than just the two, nothing outwardly arcane about him, really. Nothing that a ban or two on this or that can't explain. Part of being a scientist is thinking. In order to think properly one needed to accept the evidence one was given. Such as: there was a Faceless Old Woman somewhere in his house. He had cleaned his fridge. He thinks this helped. He does not believe everything he hears, but, well. He's got clock-cultures in there. He can ill afford to have it set aflame suddenly.

 

Carlos leans down and prods one of the tar-black drips of blocked out something-ness with his pen. It tenses and twangs a...non-sound. An anti-sound. It, perhaps, stops one of the ambient noises that Carlos had become accustomed to.

 

Cecil inhales sharply and Carlos records the response. “So you can feel it. How would you classify the response.”

 

“Oh. You know. Um,” Cecil clears his throat. “I wouldn't.”

 

“I see,” Carlos says, and adds that down onto his notes.

 

“Is that a writing implement?” Cecil asks, carefully.

 

“Of course not. Those are banned.” Carlos prods the...hmm. Phenomenon? Again and Cecil's knees give out, leaving him a bit rosy cheeked on the floor.

 

“I don't even know what writing implements are.” Carlos continued, “Who writes anymore? Don't you just broadcast your thoughts in the night sky like everyone else? Don't you just sing your novels into the floorboard and wait for the worms to vomit your life story?”

 

Carlos was not the sort of person who lived in a place for a year and didn't learn how to fit in. It was just a matter of observation.

 

“Oh _my_.” Cecil said, and he is mostly very human. He is a very human-human, even. Not very big, nor very small, not very anything, really, physically. It is only...once in awhile. On occasion. That they will be sitting somewhere, enjoying the outside after many long hours being away from the sun, enjoying the space the other takes up, and how they both feel slightly more solid for being observed by someone they can observe observing them.

 

And Carlos will be observing the world and only taking the occasional _mental_ note, when he'll see Cecil smile to himself and, being a decently good...um. Boyfriend? Being a decently good Carlos-Said-With-A-Swooning-Voice, he will ask, of course, what Cecil is smiling about, and only slightly fearing the answer.

  
And Cecil will say something along the lines of: “Do you ever think about the absolutely mind-bogglingly huge number of people who have died here, right on this spot? Their corpses temporally reaching the heavens, frozen in rigor of terror and agony? What happened to the time that made up all the years they might have lived? Horrible, vast, engulfing chasms of time any of us might vanish into? Maybe that is what clouds are. You're a scientist you would know, except talking about clouds is forbidden.”

 

And he will not say this as he says a great threat looms. He will say it as he says any of his good nights. Fond, and slightly threatening, but as if this is a grand romantic notion to be shared between a radio host and the scientist he started out having a strange crush on, which was then followed by an entire town having a strange crush on the same scientist, but it mostly working out there in the middle (he no longer says “the end.” Final pronouncements are...tricky and best avoided.)

 

And in that moment the sun would reflect off Cecil's glasses, would glimmer off his eyes like a gold rush find, or surfer, or any number of things and it would be, for a moment, as if Carlos did not know Cecil at all.

 

But, that only happened sometimes. And sometimes Cecil put his chin in his hands and stared at Carlos and sighed to himself as if he wished they'd lift the ban on pens and notebooks just so he could doodle their names together and he replies to any of Carlos' conversation starters with: ellipses, raised inflection, Oh? While is clearly staring at Carlos' hair. Cecil was human on the outside, mostly. It was what went on in his head and the way he smiled sometimes and how he would shut his eyes and report to nothing until somebody led him toward his studio. Normal, but not...typical.

 

Carlos hasn't run any diagnostics, but he is certain his own hair is fuller and softer than it was previous to Night Vale. But maybe he'd just never paid attention before. He is now, more than ever, constantly aware of the dead protein rising up from his scalp in long, curling strands, and if the dead skin of Cecil's epidermis were to touch it, then that would be a sort of necrophilia that Carlos, could, maybe, approve of.

 

(“Have a lot of dead skin? Exfoliate! Rub away at the dead tissue until it all sloughs away down the drain. Scrub and scrub until we can see the luminous living essence of your true self-bleeding through the over-sensitized cracks of a new layer of living, screaming skin. Rub yourself down to the smallest possible portion of yourself.” Cecil has said, today on the segment of Beauty Tips which Carlos had never heard mention of previously.)

 

“Would you say that was a... bad stimulus?” One had to be careful with the usage of the word “pain.” As it is rarely a consideration in the way it would be if one was in, say, Los Angeles or Chicago or _anywhere other than this desert_.

 

“Nooooo.” Cecil lay on the floor, his shadow knocked back next to him and curling up around the side of his body like black, choking pyre smoke, or any number of incidences that have occurred in the last year. The thing about bleached-hot deserts is that one notices darkness especially poignantly. The thing about lightless nights is that one notices strange beacons of what-could-be-hope-but-are-likely-will-o-wisps-to-lead-you-deeper-in-the-swamp that much more starkly.

 

Carlos pauses.

 

“Would you classify it as a good...stimulus?”

 

Cecil continued to wring his hands. “I'm fairly certain we need to fill out a from for this, or the City Department of Prevention might intervene.”

 

“Department of Prevention of what?”

 

“Preventable things.” Cecil bits his lower lip and talks around it. “A thing with a nature to be prevented. There could be a fine. Or a charge. I'm not sure how the law stands, no one has handed me anything, but I assure you there is a consequence to an action that could be prevented, and the Department of Prevention intends to do so with extreme prejudice.”

 

“Do they prevent scientific inquiry?” Carlos asks, prodding one of the coiling ropes of not-light and Cecil shivers again and it works it's way from his toes up his body like an undulating serpent, a tremor that leaves him oddly flushed and bright-eyed.

 

“The City Council is all for creating a community of understanding and intelligent citizens, provided they only ask off the list of approved questions and accept that sometimes things don't exist anymore, and, in fact, never existed, and you're wrong about everything,” Cecil says, as if quoting from a prepared statement. Which he might be. Maybe it's on Carlos' ceiling. Once he woke up to see a prepared statement written in cinnamon toothpaste on his mirror. It had been there to remind him not to do anything exciting in front of mirrors, less the man on the other side decide his life is better and takes his place.

 

He takes a temperature reading (no marked difference) checks for electrical output, radiation, introduces it to a few different wave lengths of light, and Cecil lies on the floor, quietly, hands over his stomach and smiling benevolently to himself, and likely already telling his radio listeners in his head.

 

(Sometimes Cecil's frames his opinions as editorials and Carlos will say: “We are at a diner eating pancakes. You can have opinions about pancakes.”

  
But people would be listening anyway, in other booths, eating invisible pie, slumped over tables and whispering into their water glasses. Some decently normal, reading books and eating food that looked, for the most part, like food. Some tracking dust motes like ghosts, and people in Night Vale look normal, for the most part. It's just what they do that is odd. The woman in the corner booth layering her make-up, layering her make-up on, layering her make-up on, the waitress nodding along to nothing, tracing the line of glowing letters on the menu, the short order flipping an endless line of flapjacks and everyone simply...accepting this. Or gawking noticeably, maybe, but that gawking was not perceived as rude.

 

People are always listening to Cecil. In a town where people close their eyes for years, where what has been seen must frequently be _unseen,_ voices matter. Perhaps voices are the only thing that matters.)

 

He takes his welding gloves from his workbench and tugs them on. Cecil's shadow curls up over his stomach, lining around him in sharp contrast, deepening far more than the flickering light sources of Carlos' laboratory would allow. “Does the infection normally spread?”

 

Cecil blinks, swallowing. “Oh. Um. No, I don't. I don't think so. There's no evidence that it does, but generally, people who are out after curfew are picked up by either the Sheriff's Secret Police or a Vague But Menacing Government Agency, or go feral out into the sand wastes, so it's hard to tell.”

 

Carlos touches the lithe, long stretch of silhouette and it shivers under the stitching of his heavy gloves and Cecil covers his mouth to stop some sort of shaking fricative from finding it's way to the air.

 

“I can stop.” Carlos offers.

 

“No,” Cecil says, too quickly. “No, it's fine. Um. It's probably really important that this is studied and um.”

 

Carlos watches him.

 

Cecil licks his lips. “It um. Yes. It's very um. Yes.”

 

Carlos switches to latex gloves and leads Cecil to a chair and gets him a glass of ice water because it seems polite.

Cecil toes off his shoes and his shadow swarms in a tight little ball at his feet, sinking into the chair to investigate like a curious dog before wrapping back around. It comes to Carlos' hands readily and it doesn't feel warm or cool. But there is weight to it. Pressure. A sense of smoothness but not slippery. It tingles a bit, sort of like a like a sleeping limb waking up, but...pleasant. A soothing sort of prickle.

 

He makes a note. He notes that both of his hands are engaged in activities other than-clearly-not-a-pen and yet he has still made a note. He notes that the condition is contagious through, if nothing else, shadow-to-shadow contact.

 

He hypothesizes that turning out the lights would either confuse both the shadows into a intense state of ennui that would then cause them to revert to the mindless automatons of a blocked light as opposed to semi-sentient creations of autonomous movement, or, possibly, cause the entire room to grow into a moving, thinking blackout and then Cecil would certainly need to leave to do the news, and Carlos would likely need to follow him since he needed to finish his study, and he did not tend to go to the station, given it's...readings. Or they would both die.

 

His own shadow doesn't feel like anything and gives him no feedback, but when Cecil reaches down to...in a word... _pet_ it, the feeling seizes through his mind.

 

“It is a bit unclassifiable.” Carlos agrees, his pen and notebook clattering to the floor.

 

Cecil smiles and a long loop of nothing hooks over his hand, looking like a rope of soot, matte. Carlos can see where Cecil's skin indents as it coils tight, sizzling through what someone a bit less empirically minded might consider his eternal, quivering soul. It is not a physical feeling, or, really, an emotional or mental one. It feels a bit like being on the edge of a discovery, and a bit like a tense muscle relaxing, and a bit like being appreciated for something appropriate, but also not any of those things, at all and this is why Poetry week had been a bad week for Carlos, who had simply written his note in iambic pentameter, and called it a day.

 

If Carlos thinks about it, he has some control over the...hmmm. An appendage is a proper sounding phrase. He can sort of make it move, provided where he wants it to move is up Cecil's arm, creeping under his shirtsleeve and around his wrist. Pulling back didn't work, but reaching higher was entirely successful, and Cecil's shadow started climbing up Carlos' leg, bent as he is on the floor. Cecil's throat bobbed with another hard swallow.

 

The thing one had to remember about Cecil is that, for the most part, he was entirely normal. He was never an obvious threat. He doesn't have spines or spikes, fangs or claws. He isn't poisonous. And if he's creepy, it is not in the way of some of Carlos' old classmates.

 

If he stands too close it isn't as if he is _far_ too close. He is maybe only a inch inside your personal bubble, just...just a little bit too close. He is perfectly nice, wonderfully polite, occasionally very sweet, and preciously awkward. But it feels like a mask.

 

Not in that his behaviors were a mask for some deeply-seeded evil, but in that Cecil himself was through and through an ambiguity. His smiles always felt just slightly off, like he was out of sync with himself. With the world. That he is, perhaps, too symmetrical. As if someone took half a face and mirrored it to the other side without commentary. No one else in Night Vale seems to notice, care, or be effected by it, but it is...a thing Carlos had needed to adapt to.

 

He doesn't know what Cecil is masking, but, well. It's it a lovely store-front? Isn't it a marvelous lie? He can explore the science of the rest of Night Vale for now and let Cecil remain himself.

 

And when Cecil talks, Carlos can hardly remember any of those thoughts at all.

 

“I feel like my bones are finally all where they're supposed to be,” Cecil says, slowly sinking down until they make a single shadow and that. That just means it is far easier to melt (metaphorically) onto the floor, to lie flat and let Cecil and his shadow and his eyes that are normal eyes, but maybe hold eye contact a second too long, like he sees something, or maybe like he left something there, all collapse on top of him.

 

“I know there is no empirical evidence for souls,” Cecil says, wet-lipped and wide-eyed and voice filling up the entire room and pushing Carlos' worries to the back of his head, and then maybe farther away than that. “Except for, of course, that the offering of them has a noted effect on both the offeree and the offerer, and, obviously, if it can be sold then economics states that it should probably have to exist in the first place, but I know how that talk frustrates you. Like me and mountains.”

 

Carlos has no idea why Cecil suddenly decided mountains didn't exist. He'd had a back-packing trip through Europe. That back-packing trip had involved mountains and countries that didn't exist. But Cecil had rigidly defended himself and Carlos had decided it was some council mandated ban on believing in mountains. Cecil had, instead, starting pronouncing the Gospel of Reverse Pits and Carlos had decided there had been better things to worry about. There usually were.

 

Cecil has a hand in Carlos' hair, which Carlos is sure Cecil loves as an entity separate from Carlos himself. But the feeling of their two outlines bleeding together into some deep, black pit, like the looming depth of an unattended basement to the eyes of a child, something vast and deep, leaves Carlos with his breath coming too quickly, his body feeling too loose and...shaking. A bit. Shaking with tremors as unexplained as the tremors Night Vale does not feel.

 

His hands are mapping the sticky, sweet-feeling places where Cecil's shadow is attached to his body as if Wendy had recently stitched it to his feet.

 

(Peter Pan is a very different story here. He'd gone to the school to explain to them about the scientific community and they had stared at him through the sights of their guns and he had felt almost more comfortable for seeing a direct and obvious threat as a gun. If a gun shot you, you would (coincidentally) die, and that was comforting in a town where many things were deadly and many things were not. He had read some of the books in the classroom and they had been redacted, censored and edited in odd seeming places. Peter Pan was a very different story.)(

 

“Cecil,” Carlos says. “I'm not entirely certain this is a wise course of action.”

 

Cecil nods quickly. “Right, of course.”

 

But neither of them moves. Carlos just keeps tracing where Cecil is physical and where he is...infected. And he reaches and coats Cecil's back with his own shadow, which stands up to the light worryingly well.

 

It is not a good idea to become embroiled with the threats of Night Vale. Nothing good comes of it. People were running out and becoming trees, and people were hiding in their homes, and people were, most frequently, being eaten or turned into something else, or staring blankly at each normal day, waiting for whatever would be next.

 

One should distrust that which felt good far more than that which was noticeably painful.

 

But Cecil presses his face to Carlos' neck and it is warm and lovely. Carlos feels almost bizarrely safe and content with the world-as-it-is-right-now.

 

“Oh, Carlos.” Cecil manages.

 

“Cecil,” Carlos replies, looking at the ceiling, frowning at the long white stretch of it, without a single prepared statement to be seen.

 

“I like when you say my name. _Cecil_.” Cecil says, sighing. “It is as if I was nothing, and you naming me brought me into existence, like some nightmare terror from the deepest, sweat-soaked imaginations of children, whispered over a candle into the darkened hallway of a mirror.” Cecil sighs again, satisfied as any floating cat with their floating cream.

 

“ _Cecil_ you say and here I am, and I think, why yes. I _am_ Cecil, and how wonderful it is to be so, because you are here and you can say my name, and I am present to hear it.” Cecil sighs far longer than lungs should be able to afford.

 

“I see,” Carlos says.

 

“Cecil.” He adds because he apprecaites verbal feedback.

 

Cecil sighs again and nuzzles Carlos' shoulder. “If I am to be infected with an unknowable terror that cannot be comprehended or seen, then it is best that I am here for you to fix it.”

 

“I'm fixing it?” Carlos asks.

 

“Of course. If I am not afraid than the fear cannot take hold. If the fear cannot take hold it can't move in and replace all other thoughts, beliefs or notions that create the manifestation of myself. And thus it is left on the outside and becomes something I have, rather than something that has me. If you create that fear again then it would erase me and I would be left a rotting, terrified pillar of meat.” Cecil breathes warm wet air against Carlos' neck. “So you could kill me now. Isn't it beautiful?”

 

Carlos does not think so. Carlos does not say this. Manners are thinking things and not saying them, and looking around cafes to find where one puts their dishes.

 

He takes hold of the back of Cecil's neck and he can—very nearly—feel it. The way Cecil is full of so many things. That his mind is a brackish pond with still waters that run very, very, very deep. That has a riptide that will rip. That will pull one down deep. Full of things he refuses to examine or explore because it is forbidden, and plenty of others that have been plumbed from the depths and brought to shore, sparkling or oozing or whatever and make up, in their jumbled magnificence, the things Cecil cares about. And he sees...feels...some representation of himself there. Idolized. And plenty of other things. A sense of being watched, of being followed, the rising sensation of looking down the void and being _pushed_.

 

(And he knows that that sensation comes from an automatic evolutionary reflex to lean back from a fall, and the conscious forebrain not getting the signal and just feeling as if it is about to leap. Carlos knows _a lot_ of things.)

 

And he can feel, almost, the sense of Cecil looking back. Looking too deep, looking too long, looking just a bit too closely, not touching anything, but _looking_. The sensation of being known by creatures he would be better off not being known by, or knowledge of himself. He can feel a rustling in his mind, an idea forming that is not his, a strange little thought like a song lyric trapped in his skull and scurrying around, desperate to escape, scratching at the walls, trying to crawl out of his ears the same way it crawled in, but it's too big now.

 

“Oh dear,” Cecil says and he's shoving himself up and Carlos hears a sad, hurt little noise. He makes. A sad, hurt little noise. If he is to be specific. And he tries to be. He made a clock the other day and it wept. He'd written notes about the volume of tears and sat and not known what discovery he'd made.

 

“Oh dear, I had not considered this. Oh, I am very sorry.” Cecil sounds sorry. He often _sounds_ sorry.

 

Carlos feels his limp body lifted. He is not paralyzed, exactly, but he is too relaxed to move. Each of his muscles detaching from his bones, his head flopping forward, glasses sliding down his nose, and he can hear his grandparents talking in Spanish out of the corner of his ear, but he doesn't understand them anymore.

 

Someone is tripping over the wrong thoughts. His body shudders and oh. That feels good. A hand trailing down his back, and a warm, huge bubble in his mind, floating up. He has his back to the cabinet and Cecil is frowning at him, sweat beading around his temples and he is Lovely, isn't he?

 

Lovely.

 

Cecil smiles and cups Carlos' flopped head. “I didn't realize this was the first time you'd had a sudden, inexplicable telepathic connection with someone. I'm very honored. To think, all this time and no one has wandered the perfect neural pathways of your gorgeous mind. I would happily die here with you clanging around my occipital lobe, and all you are laid before me.”

 

His voices takes up all the empty places in the room and in Carlos' body. Those hateful blank places between cells, between the vibrating mass of his atoms, the dusty corners of his mind. It is a good voice. A heavy, believable voice. Full of conviction. A voice that willed people to move as it moved. Cecil took a sharp breath and he was on his knees again, the two of them struggling and it would be easy, here, to fall headfirst into that sweet brackish water, the mix of salt and fresh and decaying algae and unknown aquatic life nibbling all his skin right off of him until he was just one hunk of exposed nerve and sinew, it would be beautiful.

 

But no.

 

No, it wouldn't.

 

He feels like he is being both pushed and tugged back and he doesn't know which impulse is his and which is Cecil's, but his body feels too hot. Feverish and appreciated and his hands grasp and instead of fingers meeting skin, a long coil of nothing hugs around Cecil's neck, and he goes heavy-lidded, palm flat on the cabinet door and Carlos can feel a soft, steady, temperature-less pressure on his cheek, trailing down and they may die here, him and Cecil, and part of him observes and takes notes.

 

There's even the skritch of a pen and then more touches, up the cuffs of his pants and under his lab coat and in his hair and he can see Cecil's pulse is beating with his and he can see Cecil's breathing is matching his own, and he can see the light gleaming off Cecil's teeth and only a very small part of him now thinks Cecil will lash out and bite. Only his lizard brain rears back, now.

 

“This is really very unfortunate that it happened like this.” Cecil mourns. “It is usually such a lovely occasion, that first time you and your loved one mix minds until it seems as if they are you and you are them and an almost infinite loop of one-ness. But we should have perhaps gotten to know one another in a more conventional manner first. However, I believe you, with all your intelligence, have come across a solution, here. But you look comfortable.”

 

Carlos may have done, he hovers in a place between thought and physical existence.

 

“I'll just do it then. You can lie down.” Cecil adds after a moment. “I would be very honored if you chose to forever remain in my skin with me, reading my every thought and offering commentary on my entire existence thus far, but I would desperately miss getting to see you, and would mourn the loss of your perfect hair and jawline and teeth in my life. Also I think you aren't quite as good at Not Thinking Thoughts Which Should Never Be Thunk as I am, given your scientific inclinations.”

 

 

His lips are thin and dry against Carlos' forehead and he shudders again, air filling his lungs. Leaving them. The taste of peaches, suddenly, as vivid and real as if juice is dripping down his chin and Cecil's fingers right his head, and dig into Carlos' pockets the same way Cecil is trailing his fingers over memories of a dissected frog in high school and long hot summer days with a chemistry set and his grandmother's hands on his head and her words filling his ears, layered thick with the emotions of being young, of being inquisitive in a world that, he believed then, would one day make sense.

 

 

Cecil pulls out his keys and Carlos' fingers twitch when he feels Cecil touch the cabinet key. He gets it open and the shadows, curious still, as puppies, swarm inside, and Cecil closes and locks the door, and layers the bottom with taco seasoning.

 

There is...an intensity which might be called pain, if one was being extremely generous with one's understatements, and he feels like one of the sainted martyrs in one of his grandmother's paintings she had around the house. Not Saint Sebastian, though, who always looked the picture of religious ecstasy and which Cecil sort of looks like now.

 

The pen scratches and Carlos, eventually, slowly, finds himself as his hand keeps detailing the experience, which is mostly the word RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN written repeatedly down the college-ruled lines in large block letters that are not his usual handwriting and one, single, “Carlos + Cecil =Forever” in a shape that was very much not a heart.

 

Cecil lies prone on the floor, nose bleeding and Carlos reaches to get a handkerchief and wipe it off and slowly, all his muscles creakingly tense, lifts Cecil up and gets him back in the chair with a great deal more grunting and effort than he would normally.

 

He doesn't know the time because it isn't as if it matters, but the moon has shifted in the sky and the general sounds of weeping and general screaming have nearly died out entirely. Carlos notes his own nose is bleeding, but he has a change of clothes and Cecil does not, and Carlos isn't actually entirely sure where in Night Vale Cecil lives. An apartment, apparently.

 

He cleans off, washes his face, hands shaking, and a slight clamoring still coming from the cabinet, but now he has a perfectly normal shadow, he thinks.

 

He goes to bed. He gets up. Cecil makes breakfast. The breakfast is pancakes and coffee and Carlos sighs and Cecil smiles and it is almost, as if, they are normal, and so Carlos decides they can make out, a little before Cecil has to go to work and Carlos has to make up more reasons why a pen isn't a pen. Perhaps it will be an alien life form Carlos is battling who is bleeding onto some paper he happened to have.

 

And even if Cecil's smile slightly lapses, if it feels like there is a step between what Cecil is and what Cecil means, Carlos does love the way Cecil is just so perfectly happy for the two of them to be kissing. Carlos had not expected to find love, but he had almost certainly never expected to find fanatical, worshipful devotion. He is not still yet sure whether he wants it or not, but it is, as ever, nice to be appreciated.

 

The next day Cecil notes: “And you know, Listeners? Carlos and I had a very special moment last night. A glorious union of our two minds and, if you will allow me the usage, souls in a heady, beautiful cocktail laced with his perfect, beautiful thoughts lifting my own to giddying heights. And though it was an abomination that which hopefully will never been seen again by any mortal creature on this earth, I am glad that it chose to use my body as a host for a brief time. Thankfully Carlos, in all his perfect and beautiful intelligence thought of a fix, and is likely in his lab right now, saving us all from being conquered by these new parasitic overlords and joining us in a vast, terror-filled hive mind. So, if I may speak for us all, I say: Thank you Carlos. And thank you for letting me touch your thoughts. It was a perfectly beautiful evening. And if I may return to speaking for just myself: thank you for letting me borrow your shirt. I feel as comfortable and cossetted as I did when every aspect and flaw of my identity was under your scrutinizing gaze. I will return it to you...eventually. And now, back to the news.”

 

(Thankfully the unspeakable abomination seemed to have convalesced into flesh and was easily contained in a rat cage, that was no longer needed as the Vague But Menacing Government Agency (to borrow a phrase) had absconded with all their rats the third week in, and had hissed when he'd attempted to find out why. So now he had a lot of rat cages, but then, better to have too many cages than having dinner running around wild and scaring the neighbors, as Cecil's mother would have said.

 

Carlos records it and it seems mostly content to wrap around itself in a mostly loving, slightly terrifying embrace.)

 


End file.
